Borgen (Season 3)
Feb. 4th, 2014 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakOverall, I enjoyed it, and liked the way the story wrapped up, but I have some complaints as well. And then there is some stuff I'm torn about. What I really appreciate is that remained from beginning to the end the story of a female politician navigating her way, with the second most important character also a woman, and ethical dilemmas as well as practical maneuvring both in the political and in the media world (which was frequently entwined) often explored. It didn't suddenly let all of Birgitte's scenes be about her love life (though she had one), and it kept a good balance between idealism and cynicism, imo.
Here's the problem/wish they'd done it differently part for me: in the first two seasons, Kasper Juul the spin-doctor was a major and Torben Fries the chief tv editor a minor character. For the last season, this was switched around so Kasper was still around but peripherally and Torben was promoted to character with the most narrative space after Birgitte and Katrine. I can see one of the reasons; they wanted to do a story of the tv network under pressure to commercialize, for which they needed Torben as a focus character. However, Torben and his midlife crisis under pressure from Alex (who took Laugedsen's place as the sole one dimensional villain of the show) the evil trivializer of news and game show fan didn't to me deserve that kind of narrative attention, and as far as screwed up self emotionally sabotaging male characters are concerned, Kasper was just plain more interesting, if the show needed to have one of those in the number 3 spot. Torben at last standing up to Alex enough to get fired, then get rehired because of Hanne's and Ulric's solidarity wasn't enough of a payoff to deserve a whole season of focus for me. Mind you, the rest of the TV1 crowd - Hanne, Ulric and poor Pia - were great; however one of my favourite aspects of season 2 had been the way the relationship between Katrine and Hanne (I always hear the name as "Henne", which is why I used to spell it differently), and because Katrine switched jobs from journalist to Birgitte's new spin doctor, there were suddenly no more two Musketeers scenes with her and Hanne, which was hard for me and only not a minus for the show because instead we got the new relationship between Birgitte and Katrine. (But I would have liked to retain both.)
I'm not sure about: what I wasn't sure about after s2 already, to wit, the show's choice of letting Katrine insist on having a child despite the fact that Kasper with his childhood of sexual abuse had a very good reason of not wanting to be a parent. (If their genders were reversed and a man would insist on having a child with a woman who'd been sexually abused, you know fandom would shout for his head.) Now, s3 did give us some consequences in the form of Katrine and Kasper having split up again between seasons, though they manage to do quite good co-parenting for their toddler son Gustav, and a few glitches in early s3 aside, manage to remain friends. I also like that Katrine does manage to unite professional success and motherhood (though the show doesn't pretend this is effortless), and it was probably the right thing not to let her and Kasper get together romantically after a split for the third time in as many seaons. But I didn't find her new romantic relationship with genius economist Soren all that convincing; maybe letting her end the season and show single would have worked better for me.
I really liked: pretty much everything else. No, really. Birgitte having lost the elections and having in the private sector in the two years that passed between seasons was a surprise, but it allowed the show to do some new stuff with her return to politics. The Moderates having drifted too much to the right in her absence, Birgitte founds a new party, which is a European thing through I must say when Oscar La Fontaine did it here in Germany I thought it was mainly about his ego. Maneouvring the new party to national recognition and prominence was a genuinely new storyline, and I liked that this didn't always happen highmindedly but sometimes with shrewed emotional manipulation; the pig story both amused me and made me think, yes, that, because that would so happen. (And yes, of course I'm sorry for the pigs, too.) Now I did expect Birgitte ending the season and show in a perfect mirroring to how she started it, surprise PM of a minority coalition, which would have been satisfying but also somewhat predictable, so I was pleasantly surprised when the show did something unexpected and presented her with a last ethical dilemma instead; she could have become PM again but at the price of a coalition with the extreme right wing party whom she'd combatted throughout the show, and in the end decides to instead make a coalition with the PM she'd originally deposed and become foreign minister, with others from her new party taking equally important cabinet jobs. Which meant the end wasn't a repeat of the beginning, though there were parallels, but the start of something new, and that strikes me as a better ending, not to mention that ending on a note of compromise felt true to how politics worked on the show.
Incidentally, I also thought the way the "Freedom Party", i.e. the extreme right wingers, was handled was clever. Interestingly their boss, Svend Orge, had never been a boo-hiss villain a la Laugedson (or Alex), though his views were always treated as appalling; the second season had fleshed him somewhat out as a human being. Now the third season had him challenged, sidelined and eventually deposed by not only a younger but also a female party member, which in the light of Marine Le Pen leading the National Front in France struck me as very apropos and also making a point: Benedicte (beautiful, polite and animal friendly) is far more telegenic than the heavy old white male Svend, but behind that nicer look, she presents exactly the same intolerant ideas, she just phrases them less bluntly. It's fitting that the final temptation for Birgitte comes via Benedicte (and that Birgitte still doesn't fall for it.)
Katrine becoming Birgitte's spin doctor and Faithful Lieutenant (but also at one point her conscience) meant the two leading women of the show were together in a lot of scenes, and this was so enjoyable it mollified the loss (at least as far as on screen scenes were concerned) of the two relationships that this arrangement was replacing, Katrine's with Hanne and Birgitte's with Kasper. I think this was also the only way I could have bought Katrine having given up investigative journalism; not for Kasper's old job (i.e. spin doctor for the PM), but for helping with the creation of the new party, a new democratic movement. Still, in my mind she returns to journalism again now that the New Democrats have become a part of the government. I think Katrine needs to be a part of speaking truth to power too much not to.
Let's see, what else? Going by the Guardian reviews, I seem to be the only Borgen fan who didn't have time for Birgitte's husband Philipp and thus was not sad in the slightest when one of the things I hadn't liked about the s2 ending (Philipp in the last minute discovering he wants to return to Birgitte after all, after a season of awkward and uncomfortable scenes together) was right at the start of s3 established to not have gone the way I feared it would. Philpp and Birgitte remain split up, Philipp only is a very peripheral character in s3 (and as opposed to Kasper, I didn't miss his presence in the slightest), and Birgitte has a love interest which doesn't cause her any angst or guilt trips. I liked Jeremy the supportive boyfriend, who was around to just the right degree, no more or less.
Oh, and the episode dealing with the proposed legislation re: prostitution struck me as very topical. We had fierce arguments about that here last year. The scene where Pernille and the other board members just talk over the sex worker and basically declare everything she says the result of Stockholm syndrome, condescending to her in the worst way unfortunately also looked very familiar.
In conclusion: a smart political show with great characters, ending in style, even if not every step on the way made me happy. I'm glad I watched!
Here's the problem/wish they'd done it differently part for me: in the first two seasons, Kasper Juul the spin-doctor was a major and Torben Fries the chief tv editor a minor character. For the last season, this was switched around so Kasper was still around but peripherally and Torben was promoted to character with the most narrative space after Birgitte and Katrine. I can see one of the reasons; they wanted to do a story of the tv network under pressure to commercialize, for which they needed Torben as a focus character. However, Torben and his midlife crisis under pressure from Alex (who took Laugedsen's place as the sole one dimensional villain of the show) the evil trivializer of news and game show fan didn't to me deserve that kind of narrative attention, and as far as screwed up self emotionally sabotaging male characters are concerned, Kasper was just plain more interesting, if the show needed to have one of those in the number 3 spot. Torben at last standing up to Alex enough to get fired, then get rehired because of Hanne's and Ulric's solidarity wasn't enough of a payoff to deserve a whole season of focus for me. Mind you, the rest of the TV1 crowd - Hanne, Ulric and poor Pia - were great; however one of my favourite aspects of season 2 had been the way the relationship between Katrine and Hanne (I always hear the name as "Henne", which is why I used to spell it differently), and because Katrine switched jobs from journalist to Birgitte's new spin doctor, there were suddenly no more two Musketeers scenes with her and Hanne, which was hard for me and only not a minus for the show because instead we got the new relationship between Birgitte and Katrine. (But I would have liked to retain both.)
I'm not sure about: what I wasn't sure about after s2 already, to wit, the show's choice of letting Katrine insist on having a child despite the fact that Kasper with his childhood of sexual abuse had a very good reason of not wanting to be a parent. (If their genders were reversed and a man would insist on having a child with a woman who'd been sexually abused, you know fandom would shout for his head.) Now, s3 did give us some consequences in the form of Katrine and Kasper having split up again between seasons, though they manage to do quite good co-parenting for their toddler son Gustav, and a few glitches in early s3 aside, manage to remain friends. I also like that Katrine does manage to unite professional success and motherhood (though the show doesn't pretend this is effortless), and it was probably the right thing not to let her and Kasper get together romantically after a split for the third time in as many seaons. But I didn't find her new romantic relationship with genius economist Soren all that convincing; maybe letting her end the season and show single would have worked better for me.
I really liked: pretty much everything else. No, really. Birgitte having lost the elections and having in the private sector in the two years that passed between seasons was a surprise, but it allowed the show to do some new stuff with her return to politics. The Moderates having drifted too much to the right in her absence, Birgitte founds a new party, which is a European thing through I must say when Oscar La Fontaine did it here in Germany I thought it was mainly about his ego. Maneouvring the new party to national recognition and prominence was a genuinely new storyline, and I liked that this didn't always happen highmindedly but sometimes with shrewed emotional manipulation; the pig story both amused me and made me think, yes, that, because that would so happen. (And yes, of course I'm sorry for the pigs, too.) Now I did expect Birgitte ending the season and show in a perfect mirroring to how she started it, surprise PM of a minority coalition, which would have been satisfying but also somewhat predictable, so I was pleasantly surprised when the show did something unexpected and presented her with a last ethical dilemma instead; she could have become PM again but at the price of a coalition with the extreme right wing party whom she'd combatted throughout the show, and in the end decides to instead make a coalition with the PM she'd originally deposed and become foreign minister, with others from her new party taking equally important cabinet jobs. Which meant the end wasn't a repeat of the beginning, though there were parallels, but the start of something new, and that strikes me as a better ending, not to mention that ending on a note of compromise felt true to how politics worked on the show.
Incidentally, I also thought the way the "Freedom Party", i.e. the extreme right wingers, was handled was clever. Interestingly their boss, Svend Orge, had never been a boo-hiss villain a la Laugedson (or Alex), though his views were always treated as appalling; the second season had fleshed him somewhat out as a human being. Now the third season had him challenged, sidelined and eventually deposed by not only a younger but also a female party member, which in the light of Marine Le Pen leading the National Front in France struck me as very apropos and also making a point: Benedicte (beautiful, polite and animal friendly) is far more telegenic than the heavy old white male Svend, but behind that nicer look, she presents exactly the same intolerant ideas, she just phrases them less bluntly. It's fitting that the final temptation for Birgitte comes via Benedicte (and that Birgitte still doesn't fall for it.)
Katrine becoming Birgitte's spin doctor and Faithful Lieutenant (but also at one point her conscience) meant the two leading women of the show were together in a lot of scenes, and this was so enjoyable it mollified the loss (at least as far as on screen scenes were concerned) of the two relationships that this arrangement was replacing, Katrine's with Hanne and Birgitte's with Kasper. I think this was also the only way I could have bought Katrine having given up investigative journalism; not for Kasper's old job (i.e. spin doctor for the PM), but for helping with the creation of the new party, a new democratic movement. Still, in my mind she returns to journalism again now that the New Democrats have become a part of the government. I think Katrine needs to be a part of speaking truth to power too much not to.
Let's see, what else? Going by the Guardian reviews, I seem to be the only Borgen fan who didn't have time for Birgitte's husband Philipp and thus was not sad in the slightest when one of the things I hadn't liked about the s2 ending (Philipp in the last minute discovering he wants to return to Birgitte after all, after a season of awkward and uncomfortable scenes together) was right at the start of s3 established to not have gone the way I feared it would. Philpp and Birgitte remain split up, Philipp only is a very peripheral character in s3 (and as opposed to Kasper, I didn't miss his presence in the slightest), and Birgitte has a love interest which doesn't cause her any angst or guilt trips. I liked Jeremy the supportive boyfriend, who was around to just the right degree, no more or less.
Oh, and the episode dealing with the proposed legislation re: prostitution struck me as very topical. We had fierce arguments about that here last year. The scene where Pernille and the other board members just talk over the sex worker and basically declare everything she says the result of Stockholm syndrome, condescending to her in the worst way unfortunately also looked very familiar.
In conclusion: a smart political show with great characters, ending in style, even if not every step on the way made me happy. I'm glad I watched!
no subject
Date: 2014-02-04 09:15 pm (UTC)The animal-friendliness of Benedicte - I suspect that as in certain cases in real life it's purely so that she can claim slaughter practices as an excuse for anti-Islamic/anti-Semitic campaigns. And I thought of Marine Le Pen as well.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-05 06:33 am (UTC)Given the political situation in France right now, I wouldn't exclude the possibility the National Front makes it to government one day. Brrrr.